Writing, a Raven and Pallas

Once upon an evening dreary, while I pondered, fogged and bleary,
Over many a disconnected fragment of erratic text,
While I dithered, nearly dozing, suddenly I started thinking:
I should be sleeping!

Sleeping more and brooding less might have done the narrator in Poe’s “The Raven” some good. More, I suspect, than pondering “forgotten lore.”

Although if the lore’s forgotten, how’d it come to be in “many a quaint and curious volume?” On the other hand, it is “a midnight dreary.”

Maybe he’s too befuddled to think clearly. Opening a window to see who, or what, is tapping doesn’t strike me as a smart move.

Grief and fatigue don’t always result in ravens perching on a “pallid bust of Pallas.” Many folks don’t have a bust of Pallas, pallid or otherwise.

It’s anyone’s guess why Poe’s narrator had one. Or why he thought putting it over his chamber door was a good idea.

Pallas was Triton’s daughter. Athena inadvertently killed her, with a misguided assist from Zeus. Maybe that’s why Poe made pallid Pallas the raven’s preferred perch. Greek mythology wasn’t all that edifying, but boring it wasn’t.

It’s a Start

I might have had something about Marlowe’s “…Doctor Faustus” done by now.

It turned into a discussion of spirit photographs, spiritualism and Poe’s “The Raven.” My guess is that I’ll have two posts by the time I’m through.

Meanwhile, I’m about a thousand words closer to having a first-draft text for that book ready. That wasn’t as hard as I’d feared, or easy as I’d hoped: which is about what I expected.

Fretting about not having more done won’t do much good. If any. So I’ll consider this a pretty good start, and keep writing.

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About Brian H. Gill

I was born in 1951. I'm a husband, father and grandfather. One of the kids graduated from college in December, 2008, and is helping her husband run businesses and raise my granddaughter; another is a cartoonist and artist; #3 daughter is a writer; my son is developing a digital game with #3 and #1 daughters. I'm also a writer and artist.
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7 Responses to Writing, a Raven and Pallas

  1. Nevermore Nevermore … Is that the title of the book you are writing?

    Writing I find can sometimes be very slow and tedious. Especially the editing and correcting afterwards. I find it very tiring. Especially when, as now, I am working on two books simultaneously.

    Good luck and best wishes. God bless.

    • That could make a good title. Maybe not for what I’m doing. There’s something running around my imagination’s back rooms, though: so “N. N.” may be the title of the next one. Or something else entirely.

      “American by Birth, Catholic by Choice” is the working title for what I’m doing now.

      And thank you! “Tedious” nicely sums it up. The good news is that my progress on the first day suggested that I’d be working for about 5,000 years, give or take a few millennia.

      Current extrapolation reduced that to about 30 weeks – – – which may be optimistic. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s nice to get this started.

  2. Congratulations on the new book and title. I am Catholic by birth. Although, these days I sometimes hesitate about some of our Church’s teachings.

    God bless you. Best wishes with your writings.

    • Thanks! I don’t have nearly as much trouble with what the Church has been saying – as how well-intentioned folks present it. That’s been an issue since day one. What changes, slightly, are details about misunderstandings currently in play.

      That’s how I see it, anyway. The good news is that human nature hasn’t changed, which makes learning from past mistakes and corrections a little easier.

      More good news, for someone like me, is Internet access to the Vatican’s information resources. And, even better, having translations into my language – – – done by folks who knew what they were doing, and trying to be accurate. 😉

    • – – – I still don’t like some of what we’re told, but that’s my problem: and quite different from not understanding what’s said.

      As far as I can tell, ‘liking’ isn’t nearly as important as ‘doing.’ As far as I can tell. That’s a good thing, since ‘doing’ is hard enough. Oh, well: ‘one thing at a time.’

  3. irishbrigid says:

    Maybe he’d forgotten the lore and he was reading the books to remind himself? Or maybe these were obscure texts containing information largely forgotten by society. Kinda like that story of the Hebrews when they found those scrolls containing rituals and procedures they’d been getting wrong for a while.

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